Apparently we should designate August as the “Planners in Literature Month” here at the Building Place Notebook.

It is true that the dog days of summer are a great time to enjoy a quiet evening with a little light reading.  We have a great “light” book to recommend today as part of the Building Place “planning fiction” series of short stories or vignettes.

Today’s posting is an excerpt from the Tom Bodett book, The End of the Road - a collection of light-hearted short stories about the people of the town of “End of the Road, Alaska.”  This book is a rarety in that it includes a couple of stories involving a professional land use planner (Mr. Emmitt Frank) as a major character.

A summary of The End of the Road from the back cover:

It’s a small Alaska town where people leave their pretensions back where they came from, and urban planners push more snow than pencils. Where New Age missionaries make appearances at the bowling alley, and the police chief weeps over the plight of Bambi. And where the Mayor stays in office mostly because folks don’t want the bother of trainin’ up a new one….

Excerpt from The End of the Road, by Tom Bodett

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A local Building Official/Zoning Inspector enjoying a well-earned vacation trip up in northern Michigan sent The Zoning Guru a copy of a Stafford’s restaurant menu page for “Dessert Wines & Drinks,” along with the following comment:

“I presume the restaurant owner either had an enjoyable encounter with the (local zoning) jurisdiction, or is a Planning Commission member and needs one of these after the meetings!!”

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Community planning tends to be an odd mix of science and technical know-how with art and creativity. Unfortunately, the art and creativity side can too often be lost under a sea of legalities, zoning administration, and other more mundane, day-to-day tasks. This is especially evident in the area of planning literature, where the vast majority of articles deal primarily with the technical side of planning.

We at Building Place are pleased to make better use of the right side of our brains by publishing another in our “planning fiction” series of short stories or vignettes…

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The Zoning Guru frequently receives suggestions on new community planning and urban design related websites to check out.  Dwell.com and Inhabitat.com are two of the latest.

Intriguing e-magazine sites covering architecture, urban design, and sustainability topics, these two websites recently co-sponsored the “Reburbia” design competition, which was intended to “to come up with some radical new ideas as to how turn the bleak future of the suburbs around.”

One of those “radical” ideas is entitled, “Entrepreneurbia,” which takes the concepts of “home occupation” and “home-based business” out to and far beyond their logical extreme…

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UPDATE 4:

Here is an example of how ONE PERSON can make a difference:  Senate Bill 726 (substitute S-1) to remove the option for youth under 18-years-old to have a place on local planning commissions has been approved by the Michigan Senate and sent over to the state House with something more than…
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